our house
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70 degrees!
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a little tour of the baby’s room.
Happy February! I know I’ve posted some photos of the baby’s room here and there, but I thought I’d do a full tour while my house is sparkling clean. But first, a before shot: For most of our first year, this was our master bedroom. But as you can see we didn’t do much to make it homey. After we started the adoption process, David and I decided to move into the more spacious third bedroom and turn this into the baby’s room. And so that’s what we did! We liked the neutral paint color (which was all throughout the house when we bought it), and my splurge for this…
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rainy day fire pit.
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the pavilion.
You may have noticed a new addition to our backyard. Allow me to introduce our pavilion. The desire to create some sort of “outdoor room” played a big part in our house-buying decision, and because finding a yard of decent size is difficult in downtown neighborhoods, it narrowed our options considerably. But we stood firm and were thrilled with the yard possibilities when we decided on our house. When we moved in (July of 2013) the backyard was fairly overgrown with ivy and pine trees, but we loved the little screened back porch and immediately had visions of doing something with the concrete slab out back. Last year David fought…
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fall.
Fall is in the air here in Columbia, and so this weekend I set to work on our sorely-neglected back porch. I swept and scrubbed the dirt-coated floor and wiped down the dresser and hauled the table and chairs out to the yard to hose them off. Now that we’re keeping our windows and back door open to let in the breeze I wanted to make the porch a place where we can eat dinner or sit with a cup of tea. But I didn’t want to spend a dime. So I did what The Nester recommends and “shopped my house.” This means, rather than running out and buying stuff,…
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new back yard.
We laugh at how much worse our yard looks right now. So we’re focusing on little corners of beauty – like the two Peppermint Crape Myrtles David brought home on Friday. Judah and Amie love the new expanse of space for playing soccer.
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losing our pines.
Two weeks ago we had 8 pine trees removed from our backyard. David’s dad was in town for the Great Tree Chopping Adventure and got to experience some of the crazy. Our concrete patio is cracked, our raised beds decimated, but our roof and play house fully intact. Also no one was injured. Whew. Our yard still looks like the victim of a natural disaster, but it’s coming along, folks! Good-bye endless layers of pine needles and pine cones! Hello blistering South Carolina sun! Before: During: Can you understand why I was feeling a little stressed? (you have to look closely): After: I’m so bummed I never got a photo of the infamous stump grinder…
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master bedroom progress.
A part of me doesn’t want to show you our master bedroom yet, because there’s so much more to do. I want it to look perfect first. But let’s face it: which of us has a room in our home that looks perfect? Right now I’m in the mode of learning to appreciate not-perfect. Also at this very moment, our back yard looks like this: Both David and I are tense from hearing 100-foot pines felled just feet from our house all day long (in case you were wondering, the garden beds were crushed by lunch time), and I personally have been terrified someone would tumble to their death in our back…
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the yard.
I’ll finish our one-year house tour with the yard. I won’t lie, our front yard looks a little scrappy. It’s shady, which is nice, but the downside is there isn’t much grass. Also, that red gravel path really is the pits. Small children love to pick up the rocks and transfer them to various other parts of the front yard so that the whole thing has a kind of speckled effect. But isn’t the porch nice and inviting? Don’t worry front yard, some day we’ll give you some love. As you know, we’ve put our efforts into the backyard this year. And by “we” I mean “David.” We did hire…
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kids’ room, etc.
I’ll finish up the inside with the hallway, bathroom, and kids’ room. You get one look inside our current bedroom which is in-process. The bathroom door is in the hallway to the left, linen closet straight ahead with a bedroom on either side. Here’s the bathroom, which other than having a ventilation fan installed, has remained untouched (well, I mean, except for lots of cleaning). View looking back toward the kitchen. Our bedroom at the exact time of this blog post, looking a little sparse and a little messy, which goes to show we are real people. We never did settle into the room this year — hang curtains (which have…